The BIOS information in most modern computers complies with the System Management BIOS standard. This means most of the BIOS structures can be read by generic utilities - very handy for System build procedures that need to know what model they are running on.

Apparently IBM has made it increasingly difficult to get ahold of their SMBIOS utility - so here are two free alternatives.

By the way, if you are using Windows 2000 or later your best bet for BIOS information is to use WMI or on XP WMIC.